Moving Walls setting ground for unique Outernet Marketing Innovation Group

Ad-tech company Moving Walls’ founder and CEO Srikanth Ramachandran, recently spoke at DMWF Asia on the topic “Is Offline Media The Biggest Driver Of Online Engagement?”, presenting how the Moving Walls vision was inspired by the big screen. Sci-fi hits like Blade Runner and Minority Report predicted a future where AI-powered and highly personalised screens would interact with audiences.

A Moving Walls note cites that with digital screens surrounding just about every type of venue, the arrival of 5G, and the adoption of location data to measure traditional outdoor advertising, “some would say much of the infrastructure to enable these depictions were already falling in place.

“However, what was supposed to be an incredible year for OOH media growth in 2020 has been impeded by countrywide lockdowns and the uncertainties of the pandemic. Yet Covid-19 did not completely hinder innovation in this space.

“A majority of OOH stakeholders used the somewhat ‘downtime’ to test, deploy, and adopt emerging technologies. Moving Walls has been one of the pioneering ad tech company to enable this.”

Most recently, the company joined forces with Quividi to strengthen the video analytics on its data management platform. The data adoption will strengthen the quality of its current audience measurement capabilities, as a result building greater advertiser confidence for outdoor executions.

Several brands have adopted more creative ways to execute their campaigns. Foodpanda used automation to enable trigger-based ads for their curated menu items. Technology enhancements such as these empower advertisers to optimise programmatic OOH (pDOOH), ensuring a contextually relevant presence.

The note also cites that non-traditional placed-based media assets are beginning to pop-up in the form of kiosks, in elevators, rideshare vehicles, transit hubs, shopping malls, and other venues. “These outernet media have become available for an addressable audience, creating growth for the deployment of technology.

“The increasing need for touchless transactions surged new and improved DOOH screen models:

“In Indonesia, sanitising machines have now become the next target for contextual advertising as a medical device manufacturer PT. Danendra Abyudaya Adika embeds commercial screens into their automatic hand sanitising devices.

“In Singapore, KALMS, a retail technology provider equips their smart vending machine digital screen networks with contextual ad-serving capabilities, reaching audiences in places the big screens can’t go. The growth of OOH hasn’t stopped, regardless of the current adversities.”

The Outernet

The ‘Outernet’ is a term coined by the Moving Walls group that defines any opportunities for brands to target audiences while they are not engaged online or on their mobile. “For the longest time, the Outernet screens have been immensely undervalued because unlike the internet, audiences are not addressable,” the note posits. “However, thanks to AI and real-time data, audiences are becoming much more addressable offline than they were before, slowly addressing OOH fragmentation, making audiences more measurable, and creating greater accountability for offline media spends towards ROI.

“Moving Walls believes that the technology is ready in this space. There are now various campaign capabilities like contextual ad serving, trigger-based campaigns, audience attribution, tracking footfall to store, and amplification to online, etc. But for offline to align itself to online, someone needs to take the lead.”

The Outernet media is the biggest driver of online engagement, as it primes audiences offline and activates them online. “The Outernet is the first marketing innovation group (MIG), gathering marketing leaders from various industries to chart the future of outernet marketing,” the note states.

The Outernet Marketing Innovation Group

‘The Outernet Marketing Innovation Group’ is a collection of marketing innovators across the Asian region, from a variety of industry verticals, coming together to share their knowledge and put out best practices and guidelines. The industry groups will be set up in Singapore, Malaysia, India, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

The marketing leaders in each market will have complimentary access to the Moving Walls’ location media technology platform and have the opportunity to execute OOH campaigns more measurably. They will be able to see firsthand the influences of offline media on online engagement as well as measuring their offline’s impact on their digital spending.